You're a Big Girl Now

by Neil Gordon

  And if you care so goddamned much about facts, well, as for what he did see next, my grandfather, there is no doubt about it at all, because while I was at Beacon Correctional, when I tracked down and interviewed Bradford Flanagan, the young dude who had just approached my grandfather, that day in 1995 on the Hudson River promenade, he told me that when my grandfather did look up, so slowly did his attention refocus that he, the young man, thought he had done something wrong.

  And this, this I admit that I believe, but note this: I believe it so strongly that I am no longer prepared to admit to any difference between what I believe and what I know.

  What I know and believe, and know and know, is that young man was wrong. My grandfather’s reaction had nothing to do with any offense. Why should he be offended? Just a few minutes ago, he’d even managed to be reasonably polite to a New York Times photographer who photographed him without permission. On the other hand, to be approached by a young man today was a very particular experience for my grandfather. What the young man noticed, in my view, was a very particular hesitation caused by that fact that, in the instant between hearing the words—Excuse me, are you Jack Sinai?—and raising his eyes to the speaker, my grandfather had careened between two emotions, as strong as he had ever felt, each the polar opposite of the other.

  See, he thought that the man in front of him was his son, my father, whom he had not seen in twenty-five years.

  The first was to say to himself, “I knew it!”

  The second, just as certainly: “It couldn’t be.”

  With the first thought his heart, eighty-seven years old, leapt into a dangerous tattoo of beats.

  With the second, it must have seemed to contract slowly, painfully, to something even smaller than it had ever been before.

  Okay, you will say I cannot know. Fine. Fuck you, but fine. That’s what I think my grandfather was thinking. But as to the meeting, I know about it for sure. Not just because of interviewing Brad Flanagan, but because my grandfather, in the months before he died, had FOIA’d the FBI records and thrown them in the drawer of his big desk for me to dBase sixteen years later, and they revealed that three separate detectives, that sunny spring day on the Hudson River waterfront, were right there with my grandfather, each one taking careful notes, and although they were redacted heavily, I read those notes.

  And I know one other thing.

  I know that it was, in the event, my grandfather’s first thought, not his second, that was right, that day and, of course, I know it because I had Sinai telling me it on tape and in transcript from when I was in Beacon Correctional.

  He knew it.

  And, in fact, it could be.

  My father was right there, right there.

  And so was I.

  Chapter Three

  Jack Sinai

  April 15, 1995

  New York City

  1

  I knew it. Today of all days. Jack Sinai was due, in a short hour, at the annual Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade celebration, where he was to receive a medal that meant perhaps more than a whole lifetime of honors: a Legion of Honor award from the government of Spain. It meant a great, great deal to him. To be recognized by the post-Franco government of Spain? And that, at the annual ceremony honoring the surviving members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade? It was amazing to him as it was to all the brigadistas, a final, breathtaking surprise in the long series of amazing experiences that had been their lives since they shipped out, each one, to fight in a hopeless cause in 1937.

  But for Jack, it also meant something far beyond the honor. It meant nothing less than that this day, this precise day, his eldest son Jason was going to come home for the first time in twenty-five years. For Jack, every moment since the award had been announced had been filled with mounting anticipation, not of the ceremony, but of seeing his son.

  It was, he was convinced, simply meant to be. His son had been in hiding for twenty-five years, and in twenty-five years there had never been a better time to make contact. The award had made the New York Times, front Metro page on a slow news Sunday: there was no way Jasey hadn’t seen. Jack would be surrounded by crowds: at the ceremony, at the reception afterward. Progressives, ex-Communists, Chomskians, anarchists—there was even a rumor that Robert Redford was going to be there. Never would there be an easier day for Jason to blend in.

  That Jack Sinai was coming from his astounding conversation, earlier that morning, with Dr. Holmquist only made it more perfect.

  I knew it.

  But just as quickly: It couldn’t be.

  It couldn’t be. Next to the glittering Hudson, against the floating of his heart on a warm wave of belief, the knowledge had to fight to make itself heard. It couldn’t be. Surely Jack was being watched, right now, even more closely than he had been for twenty-five years. Surely surveillance was heavier than ever on days when it was likely his son would make contact, days like this. Jason knew that. Jason would know that there would FBI agents, or Federal marshals, or bounty hunters poised right now around him, especially now that he was in the news. It couldn’t be.

  Still, as Jack disengaged his attention from the river and raised it to the source of the voice, it was impossible for him to divest his expression of hope—a childish hope, one that in an eighty-seven-year-old man was nothing short of ridiculous.

  And of course the voice turned out not to be the commanding one of his son, his beautiful, broad-shouldered, handsome son whom he had not seen in twenty-five years, but of a total stranger.

  “Excuse me, are you Jack Sinai? My name’s Brad Flanagan. Congratulations, sir. I’m coming to see you receive your medal . . .”

  It was a freckled, middle-aged man wearing a Red Sox baseball cap and a plaid red hunting jacket and holding the hand of a brown-haired girl, perhaps nine years old, an utter stranger, a slightly ridiculous one in comparison with Jack’s twenty-five-year-old image of his son.

  2.

  Because, see, Jack Sinai was right in thinking that today was a particularly appropriate and a particularly dangerous day for his son to make contact. He was more than right: he was kind of prescient. So much more happened that day than Jack ever understood, so much more than he ever could possibly have imagined. In fact, no one really understood the full complexity of what you were going to encounter that day: not Jack, not his son Jason, not Walt Arden or Brad Flanagan, though each was to play such a big role in that complexity.

  So on one hand, Jack was profoundly right in understanding that his son had both strong reason to be at the ceremony, that day, and strong reason not to be.

  And on the other hand, Jack was wrong: his son had no plans whatsoever to make contact with his father. So in a sense, it couldn’t be. And yet, what he knew was also right. Because in fact—in fact, now, not the fantasy of an eighty-seven-year-old man who had just learned he was dying—five, six city blocks north on the Hudson River promenade, his son was standing, one hand holding his daughter’s hand, the other shielding his eyes from the sun as he stared, aghast, at the World Trade Center.

  Of course, as Jack thought, Jason had never been near the West Village neighborhood where he had grown up since, twenty-five years earlier, he had gone underground. Therefore, he had never seen the Twin Towers before.

  Each time they came into view, as we walked south on the water, he stopped, shaded his eyes against the southward sun, and stared up at the incredible bulk of buildings, massively ugly, depressingly utilitarian, harrowingly close—for the tenth or twentieth time since we got there, he felt a strange vertigo and moved me behind him, as if the towers were about to fall.

  Then he shook off the thought. Fuck it, the fucking things had been there since the mid-seventies. It was only he who had never seen them.

  Plus, he was going to scare me. Holding my hand—his eleven-year-old daughter—he tried to turn my attention to the water, to show me the hulking Staten Island Ferry, out in the harbor, and the Statue of Liberty.

  But the towers loomed abov
e him, just over his shoulder, like a threat.

  So Jack was both right and wrong, which makes sense, in that Jack’s insight into criminality was correct only insofar as it went. Yes, a fugitive needs to stay far from the people and places that could be presumed to be important to him. But Jason Sinai, over his twenty-five years’ exploration of the archeology of deception, had come to operate on another plane of analysis altogether.

  Jack was right to think that his son would be there. Where he was wrong was in understanding why. What Jack didn’t understand, and couldn’t understand, was that in the architecture of deception, the layers upon layers of calculation of odds and imagination of impossibilities—the art and craft by which the law is broken—there comes a point when you had to think beyond the logic of simply not getting caught.

  Take, for example, the fugitive’s obvious strategy of simply avoiding the places where you could be expected to be: the places of your childhood, your friends, the familiar places where people like you gathered. In Jason’s opinion, the law had become increasingly able, every year since he had assumed his fugitive identity as James Grant, to read negative evidence as well as positive. In Jason’s opinion he was as suspicious for what he did not do as he was for what he did.

  Was it, for example, noteworthy to some data-mining operation, some random surveillance of the sort that any criminal-defense lawyer could attract, never mind a civil-rights lawyer and social activist called Jim Grant living in Saugerties, New York and sharing not only many convictions with the notorious ’70s fugitive Jason Sinai but many physical characteristics also—was it possible that some surveillance operation would one day find it remarkable that Grant not only never took the two-hour drive down the Thruway to New York City, but that he never, ever appeared at any of the rallies, protests, lectures, or gatherings which a lefty lawyer could reasonably be expected to attend?

  In fact, Jason Sinai thought, sooner or later it would become possible to read an exact profile of Jason Sinai in those very places where James Grant never showed up.

  So he had decided in his twenty-five-year meditation on deception, the twenty-five years during which he had, less than a hundred miles from the home of his father, lived as James Grant, small-town lawyer in a little town tied to Woodstock by the hip. And therefore, increasingly over the past five-six years, he had quietly ventured to the city every now and again, to a lecture at the 92nd Street Y or Town Hall, to a party at the Nation, to a rally or a protest. If nothing else, just to create an electronic trace—E-ZPass, cell phone—of his presence.

  But never, ever had he deliberately gone anywhere he knew his father would be, such as the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade ceremony, and certainly not the VALB ceremony today, when his father would be the center of attention.

  Anyway, he didn’t mean to go near his father. He meant to take a place with me far in the back of the audience and, from his vantage, watch. Even now, he was, with me, his eleven-year-old daughter, hiding out next to the water while his father, he assumed, was waiting in whatever passed for a green room at the Borough of Manhattan Community College.

  But there are certain spaces in our minds that will always be in perpetual doubt, particularly when there is something we want. In fact, when Jason Sinai dressed that morning to come to the city, he had put on a corduroy sports coat, unusually presentable for him, and a baseball cap. As if, without admitting it to himself, he did not want his father to see how bald he had grown. And so just at the moment that his father, a few blocks south, is thinking, I knew it, Jason, a few blocks north, strolls, dressed for a meeting he knows can never happen.

  That is us: our voracious little selves, always babies, no matter how we grow, always crying for more.

  9:45. Jason checked his watch, then with a nervous, somehow petulant look up at the towers, he began to walk south. What he wanted was to get to the Borough of Manhattan Community College auditorium ten minutes late. Like that, he’d be finding his seat just as the lights went down, when all eyes were turning to the stage. That gave him time to take a little walk south along the Hudson, a promenade built long after he had last been here but which, with its easy view of people behind him, couldn’t have been better for his purposes. So he’d walk a little further south, show me a little more of the city, spend some time, as the man said, watching the river flow.

  3.

  “Mr. Sinai, you defended my father, William Flanagan, in the New Bedford’s Carpenter’s Guild, in 1953. Do you remember?”

  Flanagan, Flanagan. Standing before the young man, Jack searched his memory and came up blank. Somewhere, sometime in a totally forgotten past, he had defended a Mick called Billy Flanagan and now this was his boy. So.

  It didn’t faze him. Meetings like this. Other meetings, other places, had in fact been much, much more unlikely.

  Once, in the ’80s in Santa Barbara, he’d been approached by a young woman, a second cousin it turned out, to Marguerite Roberts, whom Jack had represented before HUAC in 1951 and who even then no one in the world remembered. Roberts had just died, and her cousin had held his hand between both of hers and cried while she thanked him.

  That had been a strange one.

  Another time on the subway heading for Columbia, as was his wont, on the local so he didn’t have to change twice, he’d been stared down by a patrol cop, perhaps thirty, implacable, from Sheridan Square to 116th Street. Leaving the train at 116th Street, when the boy shifted barely to let him out the door, he’d said—more to give him his chance to express himself than any other reason—“Don’t tell me. Your father was on the job in Nyack, right?” He meant that his father was on the same police force of which two members had been killed during the Brinks Robbery in 1981, along with a Brinks guard, and Jack had helped represent Kathy Boudin, an accessory in the robbery. The boy didn’t miss a beat although Jack had thought, in retrospect, that he could read, in the boy’s eyes, the conflict between how he had been raised and what he said next, which was: “You bet, asshole.” No surprises: his entire life after, when letters arrived at his office with a Nyack postmark, he forwarded them to the FBI, unopened.

  And another time—this one, during Reagan’s first term and by far the strangest—on a crowded street someone had handed him a photograph of a Yiddish-inscribed gravestone, which he slowly sounded out to read Chaia Sinai—his grandmother’s grave in what was once a Lithuanian shtetl. There was a pebble precariously balanced on the headstone and the photograph was recent. He’d looked wildly around after the man, who had disappeared. Later, when Jack learned from the FBI who had sent it—an NKVD officer, Jewish, whom Jack had known in Spain as a Soviet soldier before the fall of Madrid—he had thought, God, could such a person really have survived not only the Spanish Civil War but all the way through to the ’80s? Purges and putsches? Could that brown-eyed, troubled boy, the cruelty of his role fitting him as badly as his shabby uniform, now be an NKVD functionary of enough power to have this strange letter of greeting delivered on the streets of New York, in the diamond district—where Jack was on the way to lunch with a state judge at the Harvard Club—no less? That letter, at the end of the Cold War, had cost him a week in front of the House Committee on Intelligence, closed door hearings: only the fact that he had so promptly reported the contact had kept him from a more serious kind of subpoena.

  There had been many such meetings in Jack Sinai’s long life, and now, this brilliant April morning—standing next to the Hudson River in Tribeca, the glassine water heaving under morning sun, not yet disturbed by the wake of morning traffic: a chance encounter with the son of someone he had known years before and long forgotten.

  Jack watched young Flanagan with a falling expression, wondering how to get away.

  This day, of all days, when he had to be free, and alone, so he could be found by his son.

  It wasn’t the boy’s fault. Above the roar of his irritation. It wasn’t the boy’s fault, to want to talk to him like this. Following the Times article Jack had received
telegrams of congratulation from Minnesota to Moscow. What would be surprising would be if Jack were not recognized by someone like young Brad Flanagan here.

  And still it was a real effort to bring his attention to bear.

  It was as if he had to reassemble, piece by piece, his whole present tense. The sun-flooded spring day next to the Hudson; the delta of distant birds high above; the reason he was making his way north through Tribeca. The fact of being accosted by the Flanagan boy before him, the child of a union man he had defended half a century ago and who, thus, now thought he had a claim on him, and, with all that was so huge in those facts of his day, the even huger news that Dr. Holmquist had announced that morning.

  Our conversation

  Was short and sweet

  From nowhere, the verses played in his mind, a song Jason used to listen to.

  Well, two conversations. The first was short. This one, judging from the eager, shy expression on young Flanagan’s face, was threatening to be very, very sweet indeed.

  4.

  Of the three FBI agents on surveillance of Jack Sinai, that day, only one really understood who they were looking for.

  This one, Walter Arden, was from Ann Arbor, and in Ann Arbor, the Bank of Michigan robbery, where in 1974 Jason Sinai’s breakaway gang from Weatherman had participated in the murder of a cop and sentenced themselves to lives as fugitives, was the stuff kids grow up on. Walt was a baby in ’74, but his own father was on the job and never did they go to the Briarwood Mall without that he stopped in front of the bank to show his son where Officer Foley fell, a .32 caliber bullet having ripped through every vital organ in his torso. Well, the Bank of Michigan was, as an English professor at the U. of M., Walt’s college—and Jason’s, as it happened—had put it, “dead letter”—or, as police said, “leads were cold, perps were old”—by the time Walt joined the FBI himself, in Detroit. Except for law enforcement, that is. For law enforcement, whether in Ann Arbor at the Bank of Michigan or San Francisco at the Park Police Station, when radicals kill a cop, there is no such thing as a cold case.